“Wait,” Dezi murmurs, his hand reaching out to halt us mid-stride. I follow his gaze to an ominous storefront where the neon sign flickers ‘Taboos and Voodoos’. His eyes narrow slightly, a silent signal of his innate vampire sense for the arcane. “We should check it out.”
“Looks like a tourist trap,” Khol grumbles, but the uncertainty in his voice betrays him. “I mean, we’re in Faerie; there’s novoodoohere.”
“Doesn’t that suggest something is off?” I ask innocently, unable to suppress the smirk tugging at my lips. The allure of the unknown nudges me forward, and despite the obvious reluctance etched on both their faces, they follow.
The store is draped in shadows, the scent of incense heavy in the air. A woman sits behind a small round table, her garb screaming cliché fortune teller—velvet shawl, bangles that clink with every movement, and a headscarf adorned with fake jewels.
“Ah, seekers of truth, come forth,” she beckons, her voice laced with an accent that’s trying too hard to be mysterious.
Okay, maybe Khol was right; this is almost offensive in its stereotypical presentation.
“Let’s just play along,” I whisper to Dezi and Khol, sliding into the chair opposite the woman. Their reservations hang between us, thicker than the incense fog, but curiosity propels me forward.
“Chaos clouds your future, dear one,” she intones, laying out tarot cards with exaggerated care. “A disastrous event looms, linked to that which you seek.” Her fingers dance between images of towersand wheels, her words spiraling into warnings of time looping upon itself.
“Time looping? That’s new.” Skepticism wraps around my words as I lean back, studying her reaction. A flicker of irritation crosses her face, and in that instant, the room drops several degrees colder. I’m about to backpedal my snark when she leaps out of her chair.
“Disbelievers court danger!” With a guttural cry, her form elongates, skin paling to translucence as her mouth widens into an ear-splitting scream.
“Holy fuck,run,”I shout, bolting from the chair. Dezi is already on his feet, darting towards the exit with Khol on our heels. The banshee’s wail ricochets off the walls, sending a shiver down my spine.
A disastrous event like pissing off a secret banshee? If so, she was right.
Outside, the bright light of day is disorienting after the gloom of the shop. I stumble, my feet lifting off the ground as my magic surges uncontrollably. Glitter erupts from my fingertips, sparkling in the sunlight before fading away.
“Witchling, concentrate,” Dezi commands as he tries to bring me back to myself.
I force my errant magic under control, grounding myself with a herculean effort. As I drift back to the cobblestones, Khol looks over his shoulder, a mixture of relief and mischief in his eyes.
“Never letting some rando read anything foryouagain,” he mutters, though there’s a grin threatening to break through. His hand emerges from his jacket pocket, fanning out the stolen deck of tarot cards.
“Snakelet, seriously?” Dezi scolds, exasperated yet relieved, as we put distance between us and the banshee’s lair.
“Research material,” he says with a shrug, tucking the cards backinto safety. “We need the Prince to help us figure out if she was full of shit or on the nose.”
I can’t help but feel a surge of triumph. Despite the scare, we might have just stumbled upon a clue. A piece of the puzzle hidden in plain sight, wrapped up in theatrics and banshee screams.
Later on,we’re huddled around the scratched surface of the bus’s dining table, our earlier adrenaline rush now replaced by an eager anticipation for tonight’s performance. The stolen deck of tarot cards lies spread out between us like a puzzle begging to be solved. Tiernan leans in, his expression serious, as Rev flips through the cards with nimble fingers.
“Anything that could be linked to Amethyst or her cronies?” I ask, my voice tinged with both worry and curiosity.
“Hard to say,” the Prince muses, “but there’s definitely something off about this deck. Look at the patterns, the symbols—they’re not standard.”
“Off how?” Dezi asks, peering over the fae’s shoulder. His eyes are sharp, missing nothing as he examines the designs. “It seems like a normal deck, but a different… theme, perhaps?”
“See here? This card should represent stability, grounding—but it’s been altered. Invertedonthe damn card,” Revelin points out, tapping the card with a frown. “If you read with it, and it ends up in the inverted position, it cancels itself out. Why anyone would do that, I can’t fucking imagine.”
“Could be why the banshee freaked out when she noticed we didn’t buy her act,” Khol interjects, still looking mildly pleased with his illicit acquisition. “Maybe she rigged her deck to always give her drama to predict.”
“Or her cards are a trap of some kind used to rope the customers into fuck knows what,” Revelin says darkly, his concern obvious. “We have to be careful not to arrange these in any layouts. She could have spelled them to work certain ways in different spreads.”
“Oh, shit, you’re right,” I say as I think back to the divination classes at school. “I remember our ‘sight’ teachers always droning on about how to protect your divination tools, and why it’s not legal in Briarvale to do shit like that. Rigging cards or runes or even crystal balls, I mean. There are a lot of shenanigans you can get up to if you’re not a seer but want people to believe you are.”
Dezi grimaces. “Indeed. I knew a coven of vampires in Romania who fell prey to a traveler group whose seer cursed one of them. They’d accused her of being a fraud and came back at night to decimate the entire camp. It was… ill-advised for certain.”
A sudden burst of laughter and chatter outside the bus cuts me off before I can ask him about it. The door swings open and Gwennon sweeps in, followed closely by Orchid, Basil, and Tanya. They come bearing armfuls of makeup kits and hair products, their energy bright and infectious.
“Time for some magic of a different kind!” Gwennon declares, a wide smile on her face.
